We need a new Bismarck to tame the machines


Michael Ignatieff in the Financial Times: “A question haunting democratic politics everywhere is whether elected governments can control the cyclone of technological change sweeping through their societies. Democracy comes under threat if technological disruption means that public policy no longer has any leverage on job creation. Democracy is also in danger if digital technologies give states powers of total surveillance.

If, in the words of Google chairman Eric Schmidt, there is a “race between people and computers” even he suspects people may not win, democrats everywhere should be worried. In the same vein, Lawrence Summers, former Treasury secretary, recently noted that new technology could be liberating but that the government needed to soften its negative effects and make sure the benefits were distributed fairly. The problem, he went on, was that “we don’t yet have the Gladstone, the Teddy Roosevelt or the Bismarck of the technology era”.

These Victorian giants have much to teach us. They were at the helm when their societies were transformed by the telegraph, the electric light, the telephone and the combustion engine. Each tried to soften the blow of change, and to equalise the benefits of prosperity for working people. With William Gladstone it was universal primary education and the vote for Britain’s working men. With Otto von Bismarck it was legislation that insured German workers against ill-health and old age. For Roosevelt it was the entire progressive agenda, from antitrust legislation and regulation of freight rates to the conservation of America’s public lands….

The Victorians created the modern state to tame the market in the name of democracy but they wanted a nightwatchman state, not a Leviathan. Thanks to the new digital technologies, the state they helped create now has powers of surveillance that threaten our privacy and freedom. What new technology makes possible, states will do. Keeping technology in the service of democracy will not be easy. Asking judges to guard the guards only bloats the state apparatus still further. Allowing dissident insiders to get away with leaking the state’s secrets will only result in more secretive, paranoid and controlling government.

The Victorians would have said there is a solution – representative government itself – but it requires citizens to trust their representatives to hold the government in check. The Victorians created modern, mass representative democracy so that collective public choice could control change for everyone’s benefit. They believed that representatives, if given the authority and the necessary information, could control the power that technology confers on the modern state.
This is still a viable ideal but we have plenty of rebuilding before our democratic institutions are ready for the task. Congress and parliament need to regain trust and capability; and, if they do, we can start recovering the faith of the Victorians we so sorely need: the belief that democracy can master the technologies that are transforming our lives.

Tim Berners-Lee: we need to re-decentralise the web


Wired:  “Twenty-five years on from the web’s inception, its creator has urged the public to re-engage with its original design: a decentralised internet that at its very core, remains open to all.
Speaking with Wired editor David Rowan at an event launching the magazine’s March issue, Tim Berners-Lee said that although part of this is about keeping an eye on for-profit internet monopolies such as search engines and social networks, the greatest danger is the emergence of a balkanised web.
“I want a web that’s open, works internationally, works as well as possible and is not nation-based,” Berners-Lee told the audience… “What I don’t want is a web where the  Brazilian government has every social network’s data stored on servers on Brazilian soil. That would make it so difficult to set one up.”
It’s the role of governments, startups and journalists to keep that conversation at the fore, he added, because the pace of change is not slowing — it’s going faster than ever before. For his part Berners-Lee drives the issue through his work at the Open Data Institute, World Wide Web Consortium and World Wide Web Foundation, but also as an MIT professor whose students are “building new architectures for the web where it’s decentralised”. On the issue of monopolies, Berners-Lee did say it’s concerning to be “reliant on big companies, and one big server”, something that stalls innovation, but that competition has historically resolved these issues and will continue to do so.
The kind of balkanised web he spoke about, as typified by Brazil’s home-soil servers argument or Iran’s emerging intranet, is partially being driven by revelations of NSA and GCHQ mass surveillance. The distrust that it has brewed, from a political level right down to the threat of self-censorship among ordinary citizens, threatens an open web and is, said Berners-Lee,  a greater threat than censorship. Knowing the NSA  may be breaking commercial encryption services could result in the emergence of more networks like China’s Great Firewall, to “protect” citizens. This is why we need a bit of anti-establishment push back, alluded to by Berners-Lee.”

AskThem.io – Questions-and-Answers with Every Elected Official


Press Release: “AskThem.io, launching Feb. 10th, is a free & open-source website for questions-and-answers with public figures. AskThem is like a version of the White House’s “We The People” petition platform, where over 8 million people have taken action to support questions for a public response – but for the first time, for every elected official nationwide…AskThem.io has official government data for over 142,000 U.S. elected officials at every level of government: federal, state, county, and municipal. Also, AskThem allows anyone to ask a question to any verified Twitter account, for online dialogue with public figures.

Here’s how AskThem works for online public dialogue:

  • For the first time in an open-source website, visitors enter their street address to see all their elected officials, from federal down to the city levels, or search for a verified Twitter account.
  • Individuals & organizations submit a question to their elected officials – for example, asking a city council member about a proposed ban on plastic bags.
  • People then sign on to the questions and petitions they support, voting them up on AskThem and sharing them over social media, as with online petitions.
  • When a question passes a certain threshold of signatures, AskThem delivers it to the recipient over email & social media and encourages a public response – creating a continual, structured dialogue with elected officials at every level of government.

AskThem also incorporates open government data, such as city council agendas and key vote information, to inform good questions of people in power. Open government advocate, Chicago, IL Clerk Susana Mendoza, joined AskThem because she believes that “technology should bring residents and the Office of the Chicago City Clerk closer together.”

Elected officials who sign up with AskThem agree to respond to the most popular questions from their constituents (about two per month). Interested elected officials can sign up now to become verified, free & open to everyone.

Issue-based organizations can use question & petition info from AskThem to surface political issues in their area that people care about, stay continuously engaged with government, and promote public accountability. Participating groups on AskThem include the internet freedom non-profit Fight For the Future, the social media crowd-speaking platform Thunderclap.it, the Roosevelt Institute National Student Network, and more.”

DARPA Open Catalog Makes Agency-Sponsored Software and Publications Available to All


Press Release: “Public website aims to encourage communities interested in DARPA research to build off the agency’s work, starting with big data…
DARPA has invested in many programs that sponsor fundamental and applied research in areas of computer science, which have led to new advances in theory as well as practical software. The R&D community has asked about the availability of results, and now DARPA has responded by creating the DARPA Open Catalog, a place for organizing and sharing those results in the form of software, publications, data and experimental details. The Catalog can be found at http://go.usa.gov/BDhY.
Many DoD and government research efforts and software procurements contain publicly releasable elements, including open source software. The nature of open source software lends itself to collaboration where communities of developers augment initial products, build on each other’s expertise, enable transparency for performance evaluation, and identify software vulnerabilities. DARPA has an open source strategy for areas of work including big data to help increase the impact of government investments in building a flexible technology base.
“Making our open source catalog available increases the number of experts who can help quickly develop relevant software for the government,” said Chris White, DARPA program manager. “Our hope is that the computer science community will test and evaluate elements of our software and afterward adopt them as either standalone offerings or as components of their products.”

Citizen Engagement: 3 Cities And Their Civic Tech Tools


Melissa Jun Rowley at the Toolbox: “Though democratic governments are of the people, by the people, and for the people, it often seems that our only input is electing officials who pass laws on our behalf. After all, I don’t know many people who attend town hall meetings these days. But the evolution of technology has given citizens a new way to participate. Governments are using technology to include as many voices from their communities as possible in civic decisions and activities. Here are three examples.
Raleigh, NC
Raleigh North Carolina’s open government initiative is a great example of passive citizen engagement. By following an open source strategy, Open Raleigh has made city data available to the public. Citizens then use the data in a myriad of ways, from simply visualizing daily crime in their city, to creating an app that lets users navigate and interactively utilize the city’s greenway system.
Fort Smith, AR
Using MindMixer, Fort Smith Arkansas has created an online forum for residents to discuss the city’s comprehensive plan, effectively putting the community’s future in the hands of the community itself. Citizens are invited to share their own ideas, vote on ideas submitted by others, and engage with city officials that are “listening” to the conversation on the site.
Seattle, WA
Being a tech town, it’s no surprise that Seattle is using social media as a citizen engagement tool. The Seattle Police Department (SPD) uses a variety of social media tools to reach the public. In 2012, the department launched a first-of-its kind hyper-local twitter initiative. A police scanner for the twitter generation, Tweets by Beat provides twitter feeds of police dispatches in each of Seattle’s 51 police beats so that residents can find out what is happening right on their block.
In addition to Twitter and Facebook, SPD created a Tumblr to, in their own words, “show you your police department doing police-y things in your city.” In a nutshell, the department’s Tumblr serves as an extension of their other social media outlets. “

"Natural Cities" Emerge from Social Media Location Data


Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Nobody agrees on how to define a city. But the emergence of “natural cities” from social media data sets may change that, say computational geographers…
A city is a large, permanent human settlement. But try and define it more carefully and you’ll soon run into trouble. A settlement that qualifies as a city in Sweden may not qualify in China, for example. And the reasons why one settlement is classified as a town while another as a city can sometimes seem almost arbitrary.
City planners know this problem well.  They tend to define cities by administrative, legal or even historical boundaries that have little logic to them. Indeed, the same city can sometimes be defined in various different ways.
That causes all kinds of problems from counting the total population to working out who pays for the upkeep of the place.  Which definition do you use?
Now help may be at hand thanks to the work of Bin Jiang and Yufan Miao at the University of Gävle in Sweden. These guys have found a way to use people’s location recorded by social media to define the boundaries of so-called natural cities which have a close resemblance to real cities in the US.
Jiang and Miao began with a dataset from the Brightkite social network, which was active between 2008 and 2010. The site encouraged users to log in with their location details so that they could see other users nearby. So the dataset consists of almost 3 million locations in the US and the dates on which they were logged.
To start off, Jiang and Miao simply placed a dot on a map at the location of each login. They then connected these dots to their neighbours to form triangles that end up covering the entire mainland US.
Next, they calculated the size of each triangle on the map and plotted this size distribution, which turns out to follow a power law. So there are lots of tiny triangles but only a few  large ones.
Finally, the calculated the average size of the triangles and then coloured in all those that were smaller than average. The coloured areas are “natural cities”, say Jiang and Miao.
It’s easy to imagine that resulting map of triangles is of little value.  But to the evident surprise of ther esearchers, it produces a pretty good approximation of the cities in the US. “We know little about why the procedure works so well but the resulting patterns suggest that the natural cities effectively capture the evolution of real cities,” they say.
That’s handy because it suddenly gives city planners a way to study and compare cities on a level playing field. It allows them to see how cities evolve and change over time too. And it gives them a way to analyse how cities in different parts of the world differ.
Of course, Jiang and Miao will want to find out why this approach reveals city structures in this way. That’s still something of a puzzle but the answer itself may provide an important insight into the nature of cities (or at least into the nature of this dataset).
A few days ago, this blog wrote about how a new science of cities is emerging from the analysis of big data.  This is another example and expect to see more.
Ref:  http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.6756 : The Evolution of Natural Cities from the Perspective of Location-Based Social Media”

New format of congressional documents creates transparency, opportunity


Colby Hochmuth in FedScoop:  “Today, in a major win for the open data community, the Government Printing Office partnered with the Library of Congress to make summaries for House bills available in XML format. Bill summaries can now be downloaded in bulk from GPO’s Federal Digital System or FDsys. This format allows the data to be repurposed and reused by third-party providers, whether for mobile apps, analytical purposes or data mashups.

“This is the result of an effective ongoing collaboration between the Library and GPO to provide legislative information in modern, widely used formats,” said Librarian of Congress James Billington. “We are pleased the popular bill summaries, which provide objective descriptions of complex legislative text, are now available through the Federal Digital System.”
The movement for more transparent government data gained traction in the House Appropriations Committee and its support of the task force on bulk data established by the House.
House bills, the Federal Register, the Code of Federal Regulations as well as various executive branch documents are currently available in XML downloadable format, but this latest development is different. These bill summaries are prepared by LOC’s Congressional Research Service and describe the key provisions of a piece of legislation, and explain the potential implications the legislation may have on current federal programs and laws.”

Open data: Strategies for impact


Havey Lewis at Open Government Partnership Blog: “When someone used to talk about “data for good”, chances are they were wondering whether the open data stream they relied on was still going to be available in the future. Similarly, “good with data” meant that experienced data scientists were being sought for a deeply technical project. Both interpretations reflect a state of being rather than of doing: data being around for good; people being good with data.
Important though these considerations are, they miss what should be an obvious and more profound alternative.
Right now, organisations like DataKind™  and Periscopic, and many other entrepreneurs, innovators and established social enterprises that use open data, see things differently. They are using these straplines to shake up the status quo, to demonstrate that data-driven businesses can do well by doing good.
And it’s the confluence of the many national and international open data initiatives, and the growing number of technically able, socially responsible organisations that provide the opportunity for social as well as economic growth. The World Wide Web Foundation now estimates that there are over 370 open data initiatives around the world. Collectively, and through portals such as Quandl and and datacatalogs.org, these initiatives have made a staggering quantity of data available – in excess of eight million data sets. In addition, several successful and data-rich companies are entering into a new spirit of philanthropy – by donating their data for the public good. There’s no doubt that opening up data signals a new willingness by governments and businesses all over the world to engage with their citizens and customers in a new and more transparent way.
The challenge, though, is ensuring that these popular national and international open data initiatives are cohesive and impactful. And that the plans drawn up by public sector bodies to release specific data sets are based on the potential the data has to achieve a beneficial outcome, not – or, at least, not solely – based on the cost or ease of publication. Despite the best of intentions, only a relatively small proportion of open data sets now available has the latent potential to create significant economic or social impact. In our push to open up data and government, it seems that we may have fallen into the trap of believing the ends are the same as the means; that effect is the same as cause…”

How Open Data Are Turned into Services?


New Paper by Muriel Foulonneau, Sébastien Martin, Slim Turki: “The Open Data movement has mainly been a data provision movement. The release of Open Data is usually motivated by (i) government transparency (citizen access to government data), (ii) the development of services by third parties for the benefit for citizens and companies (typically smart city approach), or (iii) the development of new services that stimulate the economy. The success of the Open Data movement and its return on investment should therefore be assessed among other criteria by the number and impact of the services created based on those data. In this paper, we study the development of services based on open data and means to make the data opening process more effective.”

Give the Data to the People


Harlan Krumholz in the New York Times: “LAST week, Johnson & Johnson announced that it was making all of its clinical trial data available to scientists around the world. It has hired my group, Yale University Open Data Access Project, or YODA, to fully oversee the release of the data. Everything in the company’s clinical research vaults, including unpublished raw data, will be available for independent review.

This is an extraordinary donation to society, and a reversal of the industry’s traditional tendency to treat data as an asset that would lose value if exposed to public scrutiny.

Today, more than half of the clinical trials in the United States, including many sponsored by academic and governmental institutions, are not published within two years of their completion. Often they are never published at all. The unreported results, not surprisingly, are often those in which a drug failed to perform better than a placebo. As a result, evidence-based medicine is, at best, based on only some of the evidence. One of the most troubling implications is that full information on a drug’s effects may never be discovered or released.

Even when studies are published, the actual data are usually not made available. End users of research — patients, doctors and policy makers — are implicitly told by a single group of researchers to “take our word for it.” They are often forced to accept the report without the prospect of other independent scientists’ reproducing the findings — a violation of a central tenet of the scientific method.

To be fair, the decision to share data is not easy. Companies worry that their competitors will benefit, that lawyers will take advantage, that incompetent scientists will misconstrue the data and come to mistaken conclusions. Researchers feel ownership of the data and may be reluctant to have others use it. So Johnson & Johnson, as well as companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Medtronic that have made more cautious moves toward transparency, deserve much credit. The more we share data, however, the more we find that many of these problems fail to materialize….

This program doesn’t mean that just anyone can gain access to the data without disclosing how they intend to use it. We require those who want the data to submit a proposal and identify their research team, funding and any conflicts of interest. They have to complete a short course on responsible conduct and sign an agreement that restricts them to their proposed research question. Most important, they must agree to share whatever they find. And we exclude applicants who seek data for commercial or legal purposes. Our intent is not to be tough gatekeepers, but to ensure that the data are used in a transparent way and contribute to overall scientific knowledge.

There are many benefits to this kind of sharing. It honors the contributions of the subjects and scientists who participated in the research. It is proof that an organization, whether it is part of industry or academia, wants to play a role as a good global citizen. It demonstrates that the organization has nothing to hide. And it enables scientists to use the data to learn new ways to help patients. Such an approach can even teach a company like Johnson & Johnson something it didn’t know about its own products.

For the good of society, this is a breakthrough that should be replicated throughout the research world.”